On January 9, 2020 the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the approval of a Critical Decision-0 (CD0), “Approve Mission Need,” for the proposed Electron-Ion Collider. The DOE announcement can be found at www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-selects-brookhaven-national-laboratory-host-major-new-nuclear-physics

The EIC will study many important topics in modern Nuclear Physics: it will study the 3D proton structure, the distribution of the proton spin between quarks and gluons in the proton, and it will look for the elusive new regime of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) known as gluon saturation, characterized by very strong gluon fields in the wave functions of large nuclei.

Contemporaneously the US DOE announced the decision to build the machine at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Until the announcement on January 9, 2020, two US National Laboratories, BNL and Jefferson Lab (JLAB), were competing to build the machine.

The approval and construction of the EIC will have a profound impact on the work of the OSU Nuclear Theory Group and the Nuclear Experiment Group. The faculty at these groups had an extensive involvement with the EIC project. Prof. Yuri Kovchegov has been very much involved in the EIC project for a number of years, being one of the main writers of the EIC White Paper created over 2011-2014  (http://skipper.physics.sunysb.edu/~abhay/eicwp12/Main.html) and the lead organizer of a 7-week long program on EIC physics at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle, WA in 2018 (http://www.int.washington.edu/PROGRAMS/18-3/). Both Profs. Ulrich Heinz and Michael Lisa were also involved in the community efforts to assess and strengthen the physics potential of the EIC: Prof. Heinz was an active participant of the Town Hall Meetings which were part of the US Nuclear Physics Long-Range Planning exercise in 2015, while Prof. Lisa was a member of the writing committee appointed by the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) to compose the 2015 Nuclear Physics Long-Range Plan document in which the EIC was designated as “the highest priority for new facility construction”. 

More information on the EIC can be found at the EIC User Group website, www.eicug.org/web.